Stone Soup Servings Presents: Colin Killick

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Stone Soup Servings is a regular series for Oddball Magazine that features upcoming performers at Stone Soup Poetry, the long-running spoken word venue in the Boston area that has partnered with Oddball Magazine. Stone Soup Poetry now meets from 7-9 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery’snew location at 541 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square Cambridge, Massachusetts. The open mike sign-up at 6:30 p.m.

This Monday after the Fourth of July weekend, please give a proper welcome to poet, activist and advocate Colin Killick. Colin has appeared in Oddball Magazineonce or twice. Today we offer a fitting sample of his work given the events of the last year. Please follow up reading here with being in the audience on July 6.

“Lincoln wouldn’t have done it.”– Bill O’Reilly, criticizing President Obama for appearing on Between Two Ferns

Other Things Lincoln Would Not Have Done

Promote his policies on a more establishment comedy show, like Letterman.
Promote his policies on Meet the Press.
Promote his policies on Twitter.
Promote his policies by email.
If you try to send Lincoln an email,
it comes back Delivery Error:
recipient died in 1865.

Set up a website for health insurance signups.
Encourage young people to sign up for health insurance.
Know what health insurance is.
Think of people in their 20s as being young.
Worry about health concerns for twentysomethings,
apart from being filled with lead.
Worry about caring for 85 year-olds.

Accept that Barack Obama was president.
Accept that Barack Obama had been a Senator,
a Harvard professor, a lawyer
had gone to college at all.
Accept that Barack Obama was his equal.

Because we pray to marble men.
Seat them in secular temples,
carve their words in stone,
seek them out in supplication for our modern fears–
and we all do it.

The other day, a squishy liberal page I follow slapped
above an image of The Great Emancipator
“There is no honorable way to kill,
no gentle way to destroy,
there is nothing good in war
except its ending.”
Something Lincoln said
in a Star Trek episode in 1969.

But it sounds like him, right?
Stoic, grand, and timeless.
More like him than this:

“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about the social and political equality of the white and black races…making voters or jurors of negroes…nor of [qualifying] them to intermarry with white people.”

Those words wear 1858 like a lead vest.
The placating of a moderate man,
two degrees left of the well-off White center;
the way Jefferson was,
when he expressed momentary remorse
over owning the people he fucked.

Lacking a state religion, we built one.
A nation born perfect and free,
we have never trusted progress.
To suggest improvement would imply it was necessary;
we must make it have been there all along.
We are a nation of ventriloquists.
We slip our arms inside dead men,
and click out messages in morse code
with their teeth.